Moses said to the people in his final charge "I put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life...Be strong and resolute..for the Lord will not forsake you" Deut. 30 and 31. Former US National Debate Champion and Ordained Rabbi tackles issues of Public Policy, Israel, Islamic Terrorism, Antisemitism, Jewish Wisdom and the Chicago Bears

Friday, June 30, 2017

There are no depths of low to which the Democratic propagandists in the media will sink. They have called Trump and his family every name in the book, talked about murdering Trump and displayed his severed head on a stick, advocated raping Melania and now urging Trump to assassinate his son-in-law. They are worried about their safety????

Keep it up you low lifes!!!! In case you are wondering about a rabbi saying this, remember Rabbi Akiva was main advocate of bar Kochba revolt Rome. We are in a life and death struggle to preserve Western Civilization.

As July 4 approaches, we must realize we have a battle on our hands as important as the Revolutionary War. It is a battle for Western Civilization. On one side are jihadist, fake news media and the Deranged Democratic party trying to destroy what our Founding Father's fought for and on the other side, led by Trump, an effort to restore America's greatness by reducing government overreach, rebuild the military, fight evil, restore freedoms. This week's Scotus decisions on religious liberty and travel ban help. Exposing fake news deranged media helps. Trump's executive orders reversing Obama's helps. But the swamp is deep and we must all help.

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Congress and Obama Depleted the Military

The Trump budget would increase spending only 3%. With today’s threats, that’s not nearly enough.

By

Dick Cheney and

Liz Cheney

June 20, 2017 6:49 p.m. ET

Korea is making alarming progress in its ballistic-missile and nuclear-weapons programs. Russia and China are developing and fielding advanced weapons against which the U.S. may not be able to defend. Al Qaeda operates in more countries than ever. Islamic State is targeting the West and launching attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. Iran is supporting terrorist organizations across the globe, modernizing its ballistic-missile and other capabilities and likely continuing to pursue nuclear weapons.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee last week that the U.S. is losing the military edge on which our security has long relied: “Today, every operating domain—including outer space, air, sea, undersea, land and cyberspace—is contested.”

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seconded that worry in written testimony for the same hearing: “Without sustained, sufficient and predictable funding,” he wrote, “I assess that within five years we will lose our ability to project power; the basis of how we defend the homeland, advance U.S. interests, and meet our alliance commitments.”

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In short, the situation President Trump inherited is dire. America today faces an array of threats more serious and complex than at any time in the past 75 years.

President Obama and his policies are largely to blame. The 2011 Budget Control Act, which mandated across-the-board cuts, known as sequestration, at a time when threats were growing, has also done serious damage. “No enemy in the field,” Mr. Mattis told lawmakers, “has done more to harm the combat readiness of our military than sequestration.”

What have eight years of Mr. Obama’s policies, and six years of the Budget Control Act, wrought? The military superiority America relied on after the end of the Cold War has been seriously eroded, our capabilities diminished. In the past three months alone, military leaders have testified that:

• The Army is “outranged, outgunned, outdated,” with only three of 58 brigade combat teams ready to “fight tonight.”

• The Navy is the smallest and least ready it has been in modern times. Fewer than half the Navy’s aircraft can fly because so many are grounded for maintenance or because they lack spare parts.

• The Air Force is the oldest and smallest it has ever been, and less than half of its combat forces are sufficiently ready to fight tonight.

• The Marine Corps is insufficiently manned, trained and equipped across the depth of the force.

Rebuilding America’s defenses will require a massive, concerted and long-term effort that must begin today. Mr. Trump rightly promised to do this during last year’s presidential election. Unfortunately, the White House budget submitted to Congress earlier this month fails to provide the necessary resources.

The White House has requested only 3% more funding for defense than Mr. Obama’s proposed 2018 budget, meaning the Pentagon would essentially tread water for at least a year—time the U.S. cannot spare in this threat environment. Instead of leading the effort to repeal the Budget Control Act, the White House budget envisions extending it by six years, to 2027. The president’s budget also cuts funding in absolutely essential areas, including $300 million from missile defense and $1 billion from Navy shipbuilding. In sum, the 2018 White House defense budget differs little from what Mr. Obama would have requested were he still president.

If Congress is serious about providing the resources necessary to defend the nation, lawmakers must do two things: pass a base defense budget for fiscal 2018 of at least $640 billion, instead of the $603 billion the White House requested; and repeal the Budget Control Act to eliminate the arbitrary spending caps and devastating sequestration.

The figure of $640 billion comes from the House and Senate Armed Services committees, which over the past year have conducted in-depth analyses and concluded this is the amount necessary in 2018 to begin rebuilding the military. This figure is a floor, not a ceiling.

For context, compare it with the projections from the Pentagon’s fiscal 2012 budget. Because this was the last budget prepared prior to the Budget Control Act, it was also the last one based on assessing the threats America faces and what would be needed to meet them. It projected a base defense budget of $661 billion for 2018. That assessment was made before Islamic State arose in the Middle East, before North Korea’s recent progress on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, before Russia invaded Ukraine, before China’s aggression in the South China Sea, and before Mr. Obama’s indefensible nuclear agreement with Iran.

Rebuilding the military is not a one-year project. To undo the damage of the Obama era and provide for America’s security in a world of increasingly threatening adversaries, Congress must dedicate itself to providing significant resources for many years to come.

Providing for the defense of America is the most sacred constitutional obligation of the U.S. Congress. If Congress fails in this, no balanced budget, no health-care reform, no tax reform, no entitlement reform will matter. If lawmakers fail to provide the resources necessary for the defense of the nation, nothing else they do will matter.

Last week, Iranians burned Israeli and American flags and unveiled an “Israel Doomsday Clock” in Tehran’s Palestinian Square during festivities marking al-Quds Day. This is the regime Obama made a deal with, ignoring the Constitutional requirement of a Senate 2/3rds vote for a treaty. This catastrophic deal, which Trump has called the worst deal we ever made, gave the terrorist regime $150 billion plus a green light after a decade to build nuclear bombs +++ many secret side deals which are nightmares. What else did we expect from terrorist loving Obama?

What to do?

1. Keep pressure on Trump to abrogate this non treaty which no one ever signed anyway

2. We will have to confront Iran militarily at some point, better now then later. Force them to destroy all centrifuges. Demand open inspections of all their sites.

3. Get rid of all Senators we can who supported the deal, including 52/54 Democrats. Many of them are up for reelection in red states, including Donally of Indiana. BERNIE SANDERS, whose corrupt wife will go to jail for bank fraud, was one of TWO Senators who voted against more Iran sanctions last week in 98-2 vote.

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Where are our REPUB Senators DEMANDING Mueller and the phony anti Trump investigation be stopped??????Chickens all of them. Afraid fake News NYSLIME will be upset? WHAT WE SUSPECTED ALL ALONG. DEMS BEHIND RUSSIAN PHONY COLLUSION. Mueller one of their errand boys it looks more and more like. http://nypost.com/…/inside-the-shadowy-intelligence-firm-b…/

Mueller has to go. BFF of fired FBI director Comey has hired 14 Democratic hack attorneys totally loyal to Hillary to persecute Trump based on NOTHING.From WSJournal editorial "the special counsel whose friend was fired by Donald Trump is focusing on obstruction of an investigation into an underlying crime that so far doesn’t exist. In Watergate at least there was a third-rate burglary...Much of Washington clearly views Mr. Mueller as their agent to rid the country of a President they despise. Every political and social incentive in that city will press Mr. Mueller to oblige. But you cannot topple a duly elected President based merely on innuendo or partisan distaste without doing great harm to democracy... Imagine what it will be like if millions of Americans conclude that a presidential election is being overturned by an elite consensus across the vast ideological and cultural divide running all the way from the New York Times to the Washington Post.

Move on. Let Trump do what he was ELECTED to do by the people. Mueller, do the decent thing and resign.

Carter, Clinton, Obama all Dem Presidents, all right to control immigration. Carter banned Muslim Iranians, Obama banned Muslim Iraqis. Question: why are Democrats hell bent on endangering us all the time, by now trying to block Trump's efforts to keep us safe?

SOCIALIZED MEDICINE A GLOBAL FAILURE

01/04/2016by Sally C. Pipes

The Boston Herald

Single-payer health care is back in the news. Activists in Colorado just secured enough signatures to put single-payer on the state ballot next fall. Last month, a state legislator from Philadelphia introduced legislation that would, if passed, install single-payer in Pennsylvania.

And then there’s Democratic presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) who has promised to push for a nationwide, Medicare-for-all system if he wins the White House. “It’s time for a single-payer health care system in America,” Sanders recently announced on Twitter.

There is indeed a lot to learn from foreign, government-run single-payer systems — just not what Sanders and others might like to hear. From Canada to the United Kingdom and even Scandinavia, single-payer systems have proven cripplingly expensive even as they limit patients’ ability to access quality care.

Consider Canada’s true single-payer system. Patients must wait an average of more than two months to see a specialist after getting a referral from their general practitioner, according to the Fraser Institute, a nonpartisan Canadian think tank. Patients can expect to wait another 9.8 weeks, on average, before receiving the treatment they need from that specialist.

Overall, Canadians now wait even longer than last year — and 97 percent longer than they did in 1993.

Access to care is so poor, in fact, that 52,000 Canadians flee to the United States each year for medical attention. They refuse to wait in line for care as their health deteriorates.

The situation is no better under Great Britain’s mainly government-run health system.

As of this summer, 3.4 million Brits were stuck on waiting lists — a 36 percent uptick since 2010. Last year, about a million people had to wait more than four months to get treatment. Almost 300,000 waited at least six months.

As with most centrally-controlled bureaucracies, the British health system is inefficient. According to a recent government report, the country’s National Health Service is plagued by problems like neglect, incorrectly-administered medications and inadequate care for the dying. In some cases, the report concluded that the treatment of patients was “appalling.” Last month, more than 40,000 young doctors threatened an all-out strike over their hours.

As for Scandinavia, patients there would likely advise Sanders to reject socialized medicine.

In recent years, Swedish residents have gravitated toward private insurance to avoid the rationed care and long wait times common in the country’s single-payer system. Today, roughly one in 10 Swedes — more than half a million people — has a private health insurance policy.

As the Swedish economist Nima Sanandaji recently explained, the country’s socialist experiment has proven “such a colossal failure that few even in the left today view the memory as something positive.”

Of course, Sanders needn’t look abroad to see how socialized medicine fails patients. Just last year, his home state of Vermont abandoned an attempt to launch a statewide single-payer system. The reason? As Gov. Peter Shumlin — who supported it — explained, “The cost of that plan turned out to be enormous.”

The same would be true of the “Medicare-for-All” policy that Sanders continues to tout. According to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the senator’s proposal would require roughly $15 trillion in new federal spending over 10 years.

Single-payer in America isn’t that far-fetched. According to a December Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 58 percent of Americans support a Medicare-for-all system.

What’s more, UnitedHealth — the largest insurer in the country — recently announced that it may pull out of Obamacare’s exchanges in 2017. Others may follow suit, now that Congress has approved a budget measure that cuts federal payments to insurers originally promised by Obama-care. That may cause even more insurers to lose money on the exchanges.

If they respond to those losses by opting out of the exchanges, then Obamacare would collapse — and single-payer advocates would have an opening to push for Medicare-for-all as a replacement government-run system that denies patients access to high-quality health care. Embracing such failed health policies would cause nothing but harm for Americans.

17 Arguments Against Socialized Medicine

Tuesday, November 01, 1960

Mr. Johnson is a teacher at Hialeah Senior High School in Florida.

https://fee.org/articles/17-arguments-against-socialized-medicine/

After School recently, a student posed an interesting question. His father was deceased, and he and his mother were living on a small in­come of which social security con­stituted a substantial portion. His mother had recently undergone an expensive operation, and it had been tough to pay the bills. His question was: "Why shouldn’t I favor government medical assist­ance?"

Other obligations prevented me from answering immediately, but the next morning the student re­ceived the following 17 points:

1. To the extent that your mother is living on social security she is al­ready the victim of an actuarially unsound program classified by many as an outright fraud. A large part of your difficulty in meeting bills is the product of this govern­ment program designed to "help the aged." You may be sure that a government program designed to "help the sick" would fare no bet­ter, and probably worse. People do better if they are charged with per­sonal responsibility for their wel­fare.

2. Social security payments are reduced or eliminated if your mother earns over $1,200 per year. This particular inequity within the entire inequitable program should be remedied, yet the problems posed by any attempt at "equity" tend to point up the undesirability of seeking "solutions" on a na­tional basis.

3. Your mother’s income is un­doubtedly suffering from inflation, which is the result of prior govern­ment activity. Please, therefore, do not ask for more government pro­grams. Inflation raises the cost of everything, medical services and supplies included, and such "hid­den taxation" affects all income, taxable and nontaxable.

4. If you ask the government to force others (through taxes) to help you in your particular situa­tion, you cannot expect others not to ask government to force you to help them. In all probability you will end by paying out much more than you will receive through this process.

5. Assuming genuine need, pri­vate charities and local agencies would be willing and able to do considerably more along lines of aiding you if taxes were not al­ready markedly diminishing their ability and inclination to function. The high progressive rate also tends to discourage many would-be doctors, whose terrific initial edu­cational investment should be al­lowed to pay off. To the extent that a doctor shortage exists, govern­ment must share a substantial por­tion of the blame. My own dentist has cut his work-week from five days to four because, in the words of his financial adviser, he was "working too many days for the government." Do not, therefore, add to this tax burden.

6. Even assuming that the taxes required to run a program of gov­ernment medicine might aid your mother in the short run, such taxa­tion would also put more people into her shoes.

7. Government bidding for medi­cal services and supplies would in­crease costs. Great Britain‘s pro­gram has slightly more than trip­led such costs. If you are serious in your alarm over high costs, you will resist a government program strongly.

8. Since the program would be designed to help millions of others, and not your mother alone, com­petition for supplies and services, in addition to raising costs, might make it difficult to obtain any at all. A shortage of goods and serv­ices would immediately occur if the government were to attempt to mitigate the effects of its own ac­tions through price controls. Pri­ority given to more serious cases would frustrate immediate treat­ment of minor cases. A man who could be "back on the job" in min­utes might have to wait weeks, with resulting loss of production to himself and to society.

9. A program of socialized medi­cine, once begun, would be ex­tremely difficult, politically, to abandon, no matter how mistaken the program should prove to be.

10. The vast majority of doctors do not like socialized medicine. The reasons they give—dislike of regi­mentation, the destruction of doc­tor-patient relationship, and the like—while important in them­selves, are secondary to the ines­capable conclusion. If the govern­ment seeks to accomplish by force something that would not occur voluntarily and institutes a pro­gram which doctors dislike, the re­sult will be fewer, and poorer, doc­tors. We hardly want this situa­tion.

11. The temptation to "get some­thing for nothing" would prove ir­resistible for many people. Statis­tics contrasting the number and length of illnesses of those who have government health insurance (in Great Britain and elsewhere) with those who have private insur­ance (in the U.S. and elsewhere) provide amusing proof of this. A large portion of government ex­penditure would go to those whose needs are questionable. This, also, would increase costs. Lack of local administration and responsibility might frequently deny sufficient benefits to those whose needs are genuine.’

12. Socialized medicine would be another long step to total socialism. Socialism, whatever else it may do, hardly increases production. By its emphasis on distribution, it re­tards production in a thousand ways. This will lower the standard of living for everyone, your mother included.

13. The functions of medicine are basically twofold: administra­tion of known drugs and tech­niques, and research. We come in contact with the profession through the former, but progress occurs only through the latter.’ So­cialized medicine would cause a shifting of emphasis from research to general upkeep, with the result that over-all medical progress would be retarded. The British ex­perience proves this beyond ques­tion.

14. Since the science of medicine under free enterprise in the United States has given us the best medi­cal service in the world’s history; since it has prolonged life in a phenomenal manner; since our medical supplies and services are infinitely superior to those in any other country… you should at­tempt to retain these advantages by fighting to retain the system under which they developed.

15. It is a mistake for the gov­ernment to consider the problems of the sick apart from those of so­ciety as a whole. Such considera­tion is a private matter, to be solved by private and local meth­ods. Such a narrow outlook on be­half of the government obscures the broader problem which is, in a moral sense, one of promoting respect for the individual and the furtherance of initiative and self-providence; in an economic sense, one of increasing production for the benefit of all citizens;3 and in a political sense, one of removing government as a battlefield for spe­cial favor and substituting cohe­sion and solidarity for division and disintegration.

16. No system, not even the free economy, can give everyone every­thing he wants at once. It is dan­gerous to allow or encourage any government to substitute its judg­ment for that of its citizens. It is well to keep in mind that no coun­try has come close to matching the United States in the solution of the very problem your mother pre­sents. I would recommend investi­gation of the numerous, actuarially sound private health insurance pro­grams, which already insure a sub­stantial majority of all American families. There are approximately 150 such programs in the United States today. Such diversification provides an ability to suit individ­ual requirements which would be impossible under a federal pro­gram.

17. Finally, let us consider the moral issue. You may feel that this is simple—that it is not morally correct for society to neglect those in need. But is there such a thing as "collective morality"?4 Is not moral action exclusively individ­ual? Can any action be moral if it is induced by compulsion? Who is acting and thinking in moral terms: the person who, cognizant of those in need, seeks to remedy the situation insofar as possible by resorting to his own pocketbook, or a person who thinks only in terms of legislation to force everyone else to take care of the problem?

Even if the facts were otherwise and it could be shown that the gov­ernment were capable of providing satisfactory medical care, the basic moral question you should ask yourself is this: What right have I to take another’s property without his consent, for my personal use? Under what conditions does it be­come proper or right for any in­dividual or group to rob another?

I feel that when you have an­swered the questions contained in this last point, you may find the first sixteen arguments superflu­ous. At least I hope so.

Why does media continue to LIE/make stuff up about supposed Trump-Russian collusion? 1. makes them $ 2. Dems want them to do so to distract us from their many crimes and media is propaganda arm of the Dems. https://theintercept.com/2017/06/27/cnn-journalists-resign-latest-example-of-media-recklessness-on-the-russia-threat/

The editorial cited a study by Just Facts Daily, a libertarian think tank. A Harvard/you.Gov poll had as many as 5.7 million non-citizens saying they had cast votes in former President Barack Obama's first election, and that number was 3.6 million in 2012.

With 21 million American adults in the 2016 Census – up from 19.4 million in 2008, the start of the Obama administration – "it is therefore highly likely that millions of non-citizens cast votes in 2016," according to the study.

"Democrats had extensive get-out-the-vote campaigns in areas heavily populated by illegal aliens," according to the IBD editorial this week. "As far back as 2008, Obama made sure that those who wanted to vote knew it was safe, announcing that election records would not be cross-checked with immigration databases.

"And last year, the Obama White House supported a court injunction that kept Kansas, Alabama, and Georgia from requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. The message was sent, loud and clear: If you're a non-citizen or here illegally, don't be afraid. You're free to vote. No one will stop you."

The editorial concludes Democrats should be troubled by the notion every "non-citizen voter negates the vote of a citizen," and American needs to "stop encouraging non-citizens and illegal aliens to vote in our election."

Hillary Clinton garnered more than 800,000 votes from noncitizens on Nov. 8, an approximation far short of President Trump’s estimate of up to 5 million illegal voters but supportive of his charges of fraud.

Political scientist Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, has worked with colleagues to produce groundbreaking research on noncitizen voting, and this week he posted a blog in response to Mr. Trump’s assertion.

Based on national polling by a consortium of universities, a report by Mr. Richman said 6.4 percent of the estimated 20 million adult noncitizens in the U.S. voted in November. He extrapolated that that percentage would have added 834,381 net votes for Mrs. Clinton, who received about 2.8 million more votes than Mr. Trump.

“Is it plausible that non-citizen votes added to Clinton’s margin? Yes,” Mr. Richman wrote. “Is it plausible that non-citizen votes account for the entire nation-wide popular vote margin held by Clinton? Not at all.”

Still, the finding is significant because it means noncitizens may have helped Mrs. Clinton carry a state or finish better

Saturday, June 24, 2017

1. Tens of thousands of Americans have done business with Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, not to mention before.2. In 2009 President Obama made the first of his two trips to Russia with a gaggle of U.S. business leaders in tow.3. Every president for 75 years has sought improved relations with Russia.4. Russian diplomats live in the U.S. and rub shoulders with countless Americans.5. innocuous, incidental and routine Trump associations interspersed with claims from the Trump dossier to make the innocuous, incidental and routine seem nefarious.By

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

June 20, 2017 6:51 p.m. ET

Americans won’t be really good citizens until they read Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein’s 1999 law review article about “availability cascades.”

Their launching point is the process by which we (i.e., human beings) decide to believe what others believe, and judge the truth of a proposition by how familiar it is. Such “availability cascades” drive government policy in good ways and bad, but usually bad. An example the authors analyze in detail is 1989’s fake “Alar” cancer scare that devastated U.S. apple growers.

Which brings us to today’s question: How did it become widely believed in the first half of 2017 that a U.S. president committed treason with Russia?

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Consider what has passed for proof in the media. Tens of thousands of Americans have done business with Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, not to mention before.

In 2009 President Obama made the first of his two trips to Russia with a gaggle of U.S. business leaders in tow.

Of these many thousands, four were associated with the Trump campaign, and now became evidence of Trump collusion with Russia.

Every president for 75 years has sought improved relations with Russia. That’s what those endless summits were about. Mr. Trump, in his typically bombastic way, also promoted improved relations with Russia. Now this was evidence of collusion.

Russian diplomats live in the U.S. and rub shoulders with countless Americans. Such shoulder-rubbing, if Trump associates were involved, now is proof of crime.

The Alar pesticide scare only took off when activists whom Messrs. Kuran and Sunstein label “availability entrepreneurs” peddled deceptive claims to a credulous “60 Minutes.” We would probably not be having this Russia discussion today if not for the so-called Trump dossier alleging improbable, lurid connections between Donald Trump and the Kremlin.

It had no provenance that anyone was bound to respect or rely upon. Its alleged author, a retired British agent named Christopher Steele, supposedly had Russian intelligence sources, but why would Russian intelligence blow the cover of their blackmail agent Mr. Trump whom they presumably so carefully and expensively cultivated? They wouldn’t.

Yet recall the litany of Rep. Adam Schiff, who declared in a House Intelligence Committee hearing: “Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence?”

His litany actually consisted of innocuous, incidental and routine Trump associations interspersed with claims from the Trump dossier to make the innocuous, incidental and routine seem nefarious.

Maybe Mr. Schiff is a cynic, or maybe Harvard Law sent him back into the world with the same skull full of mush with which he arrived. But ever since, every faulty or incomplete recollection of a meeting with a Russian has been promoted in the media as proof of treason by Trump associates.

The president’s obvious irritation with being called a traitor is proof that he is a traitor.

Whether the Russia incubus did more harm to Mr. Trump’s vote or Hillary’s vote during the election is impossible to know. But Mr. Trump won, so under the hindsight fallacy his victory is now proof that he conspired with Russia.

The term “availability bias” originated in the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose Nobel Prize-winning research gave birth to the field of behavioral economics.

Mr. Kahneman went on to write 2011’s indispensable “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” and I’m here to tell you that journalists especially pride themselves on their fast thinking—the kind that mistakes randomness for pattern, confuses correlation with causation, and gives excessive rein to emotional and cognitive biases.

Notice I don’t say reporters and editors are so dumb they can’t free themselves from such errors. I say that such errors are their stock in trade.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anatomy-of-a-witch-hunt-1497999116

The original allegory of fast thinking, of course, is the old folklore tale, “the emperor’s new clothes.” In his 1922 book “Public Opinion,” Walter Lippmann explained how journalists reduce complex, novel realities to off-the-shelf “stereotypes.”

Or as a colleague once said of Stalin, “[He] tries to force life into a ready-made framework. The more life resists . . . the more forcefully he mangles and breaks it.”

Come to think of it, that’s not a bad way of describing how the D.C. anthill has reacted to the unexpected, exotic, high-risk, possibly providential experiment of the Trump presidency.

We mean every descriptor. His very unsuitability, the mood of the American public that elected him, the obscure impasse of American politics that brought him to power—all these signs deserve more respect than they’re getting.

His Torquemadas don’t and can’t know whether our democracy, in the improbable Mr. Trump, found a lever to move us forward, and there’s something repugnant in their desire not to find out.